I agree. This is a "Version 1.0." Haswell ought to allow for thinner, lighter designs. There may well be a market for a "toasterfridge" device in the future. Hopefully Apple is paying close attention and doesn't miss market signals the way it did with larger phones.

In order for the pressure sensitive table to be any good for serious artists it would have to be bigger than 10". My wife does work on 1.2GB photoshop files and her 21" Cintiq doesn't even feel big enough.

Microsofts tablet is too expensive to be a toy and too diminutive to be a production machine. I can't think of anything serious that I'd want to do on a 10" M$ tablet. If it's something quick like browsing/email then an iPad would be better. If it something serious like graphic design or programming then I want a bigger screen.

Maybe not graphic design or programming, but the journalism field has been looking for something like this for awhile. We've been stuck between gimped BlackBerry's for quick text editing, to suffering through touch-screen phones which are painfully slow at typing, to lugging around a laptop. There's no real solution currently when you want to carry around one device that does everything necessary. It's that hard keyboard that makes all the difference to a lot of people. I still hate typing on a touch screen.

Enter the Surface Pro, which should presumably be able to handle all these needs. I don't doubt that programmers might not love this thing, though.

I'm sorry but as far as the Surface goes, I see nothing I need nor want.

Such a device (tablet/laptop hybrid) may be useful for those that do not want to have separate devices, but for me the term compromised is as accurate as it gets. This seems to be targeted to the techie (such as a lot of us here), hardcore Microsoft fan, and the like. However, I assume most techies already have more powerful computing devices, negating the need for the compromise in the first place.

Android covers the tweakers as well as the low(er) end market. The rest of us want dead simple easy. The iPad covers this well: non-techie mom and pops, kids, & even tech-savvy folks who just want to start the car and go without ever popping the hood.

I just don't see this taking off...the alternatives are too strong. Very, very niche. But, as always, time will tell, and it's always good to have more choices out there for those who want them.

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Love GOD more than anything, and your neighbor as you love you. Do this, and life will be good!

I've been to the stores a handful of times to play with the Windows 8 tablets, particularly the Surface. Not bad. Not terrible. Not great either. Even after watching Windows 8 tutorials on youtube, and knowing the layout of the land, some functions I still got stuck on. But that's all do-able once I'd get the hang of it. The biggest deal breaker for me is the awful quality of keyboard of the Surface RT. You have to press down on the keys very deliberately to avoid mis-typing, unlike a keyboard where you can pick up speed and write without thinking of the keyboard. Not so with the Surface, at least from my experiments. If I'm going to cart around something of the weight of the Surface plus Keyboard, it does not tempt me away from my adorable MacBook Air 11".

If there was a 32gb version then there’d only be 2gb left for the user

Realistically, 0GB because 2GB would be used by disk overhead then the 30GB used by the system. And there's also VRAM. I've tried using a MacBook with 1MB of available space (booting from flash drives because my HDD died), and it didn't go well.

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Quote:

Originally Posted by ThisIsNotMe

Tablets have already replaced laptops for 99.9% of the general public.

Do you have numbers? From personal experience, not many people I know have tablets, and only 2 of them really use them in place of a PC. I think if you look at market share, the 99.9% "statistic" can be disproven easily.

Meh, just get Windows using Chrome as the browser if you want that. Personally, I'd use Safari just because it doesn't get infested with Babylon and whatever since very few people use it. The PC market is saturated and slowly dying.

Okay… now everyone who keeps insisting that Apple merge iOS and OS X and run it on some Mac/iPad hybrid—observe closely! Microsoft has gone to a lot of effort here just to show you all why Apple chose not to do it.

I will wait for the next release of the Surface pro. I really like my iPad, but the problem is its limitation. I don't think that tablet will be a laptop replacement. For me, it is just the device for surfing the web or playing games.

Microsoft Surface completely beats the iPad in terms of word processing application. I tried to use the Page with on-screen keyboard, but it is awkward in anyway.

In order for the pressure sensitive table to be any good for serious artists it would have to be bigger than 10". My wife does work on 1.2GB photoshop files and her 21" Cintiq doesn't even feel big enough.

Microsofts tablet is too expensive to be a toy and too diminutive to be a production machine. I can't think of anything serious that I'd want to do on a 10" M$ tablet. If it's something quick like browsing/email then an iPad would be better. If it something serious like graphic design or programming then I want a bigger screen.

My 21" Cintiq died years ago and I started using my 12" backup Cintiq while I waited for my new 21" to arrive. But after a week of using the 12" Cintiq I realized it was actually big enough. So I canceled the 21" order and I've been using the 12" Cintiq for years now.

I'm interested in the Surface Pro as a drawing tool (not as a replacement for my Macbook Pro), just to run Photoshop and Storyboard Pro. It costs about the same as a Cintiq 12 WX, but it's a hell of a lot more portable. And if I can slide the image around using multi-touch, then a 10" screen would probably be fine; it's not too big a step down from 12. Just going by the reviews, though, I'm not sure it's compelling enough to win over many non-artists.

The day Microsoft gives up Windows and moves to some flavor of Unix or Linux they'll be MUCH better off. First of all, they wont have to take a massive 30GB slice out of the SSD... No normal OS takes up that much space. In general, Windows is ridiculously bloated.